Friday Squid Blogging: Giant Squid Nebula

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Pretty:

A mysterious squid-like cosmic cloud, this nebula is very faint, but also very large in planet Earth’s sky. In the image, composed with 30 hours of narrowband image data, it spans nearly three full moons toward the royal constellation Cepheus. Discovered in 2011 by French astro-imager Nicolas Outters, the Squid Nebula’s bipolar shape is distinguished here by the telltale blue-green emission from doubly ionized oxygen atoms. Though apparently surrounded by the reddish hydrogen emission region Sh2-129, the true distance and nature of the Squid Nebula have been difficult to determine. Still, a more recent investigation suggests Ou4 really does lie within Sh2-129 some 2,300 light-years away. Consistent with that scenario, the cosmic squid would represent a spectacular outflow of material driven by a triple system of hot, massive stars, cataloged as HR8119, seen near the center of the nebula. If so, this truly giant squid nebula would physically be over 50 light-years across.

As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered.

Read my blog posting guidelines here.

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Top Suspect in 2015 Ashley Madison Hack Committed Suicide in 2014

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When the marital infidelity website AshleyMadison.com learned in July 2015 that hackers were threatening to publish data stolen from 37 million users, the company’s then-CEO Noel Biderman was quick to point the finger at an unnamed former contractor. But as a new documentary series on Hulu reveals [SPOILER ALERT!], there was just one problem with that theory: Their top suspect had killed himself more than a year before the hackers began publishing stolen user data.

The new documentary, The Ashley Madison Affair, begins airing today on Hulu in the United States and on Disney+ in the United Kingdom. The series features interviews with security experts and journalists, Ashley Madison executives, victims of the breach and jilted spouses.

The series also touches on shocking new details unearthed by KrebsOnSecurity and Jeremy Bullock, a data scientist who worked with the show’s producers at the Warner Bros. production company Wall to Wall Media. Bullock had spent many hours poring over the hundreds of thousands of emails that the Ashley Madison hackers stole from Biderman and published online in 2015.

Wall to Wall reached out in July 2022 about collaborating with Bullock after KrebsOnSecurity published A Retrospective on the 2015 Ashley Madison Breach. That piece explored how Biderman — who is Jewish — had become the target of concerted harassment campaigns by anti-Semitic and far-right groups online in the months leading up to the hack.

Whoever hacked Ashley Madison had access to all employee emails, but they only released Biderman’s messages — three years worth. Apropos of my retrospective report, Bullock found that a great many messages in Biderman’s inbox were belligerent and anti-Semitic screeds from a former Ashley Madison employee named William Brewster Harrison.

William Harrison’s employment contract with Ashley Madison parent Avid Life Media.

The messages show that Harrison was hired in March 2010 to help promote Ashley Madison online, but the messages also reveal Harrison was heavily involved in helping to create and cultivate phony female accounts on the service.

There is evidence to suggest that in 2010 Harrison was directed to harass the owner of Ashleymadisonsucks.com into closing the site or selling the domain to Ashley Madison.

Ashley Madison’s parent company — Toronto-based Avid Life Media — filed a trademark infringement complaint in 2010 that succeeded in revealing a man named Dennis Bradshaw as the owner. But after being informed that Bradshaw was not subject to Canadian trademark laws, Avid Life offered to buy AshleyMadisonSucks.com for $10,000.

When Bradshaw refused to sell the domain, he and his then-girlfriend were subject to an unrelenting campaign of online harassment and blackmail. It now appears those attacks were perpetrated by Harrison, who sent emails from different accounts at the free email service Vistomail pretending to be Bradshaw, his then-girlfriend and their friends.

[As the documentary points out, the domain AshleyMadisonSucks.com was eventually transferred to Ashley Madison, which then shrewdly used it for advertising and to help debunk theories about why its service was supposedly untrustworthy].

Harrison even went after Bradshaw’s lawyer and wife, listing them both on a website he created called Contact-a-CEO[.]com, which Harrison used to besmirch the name of major companies — including several past employers — all entities he believed had slighted him or his family in some way. The site also claimed to include the names, addresses and phone numbers of top CEOs.

A cached copy of Harrison’s website, contact-the-ceo.com.

An exhaustive analysis of domains registered to the various Vistomail pseudonyms used by Harrison shows he also ran Bash-a-Business[.]com, which Harrison dedicated to “all those sorry ass corporate executives out there profiting from your hard work, organs, lives, ideas, intelligence, and wallets.” Copies of the site at archive.org show it was the work of someone calling themselves “The Chaos Creator.”

Will Harrison was terminated as an Ashley Madison employee in November 2011, and by early 2012 he’d turned his considerable harassment skills squarely against the company. Ashley Madison’s long-suspected army of fake female accounts came to the fore in August 2012 after the former sex worker turned activist and blogger Maggie McNeill published screenshots apparently taken from Ashley Madison’s internal systems suggesting that a large percentage of the female accounts on the service were computer-operated bots.

Ashley Madison’s executives understood that only a handful of employees at the time would have had access to the systems needed to produce the screenshots McNeill published online. In one exchange on Aug. 16, 2012, Ashley Madison’s director of IT was asked to produce a list of all company employees with all-powerful administrator access.

“Who or what is asdfdfsda@asdf.com?,” Biderman asked, after being sent a list of nine email addresses.

“It appears to be the email address Will used for his profiles,” the IT director replied.

“And his access was never shut off until today?,” asked the company’s general counsel Mike Daks.

A Biderman email from 2012.

What prompted the data scientist Bullock to reach out were gobs of anti-Semitic diatribes from Harrison, who had taken to labeling Biderman and others “greedy Jew bastards.”

“So good luck, I’m sure we’ll talk again soon, but for now, Ive got better things in the oven,” Harrison wrote to Biderman after his employment contract with Ashley Madison was terminated. “Just remember I outsmarted you last time and I will outsmart and out maneuver you this time too, by keeping myself far far away from the action and just enjoying the sideline view, cheering for the opposition.”

A 2012 email from William Harrison to former Ashley Madison CEO Noel Biderman.

Harrison signed his threatening missive with the salutation, “We are legion,” suggesting that whatever comeuppance he had in store for Ashley Madison would come from a variety of directions and anonymous hackers.

The leaked Biderman emails show that Harrison made good on his threats, and that in the months that followed Harrison began targeting Biderman and other Ashley Madison executives with menacing anonymous emails and spoofed phone calls laced with profanity and anti-Semitic language.

But on Mar. 5, 2014, Harrison committed suicide by shooting himself in the head with a handgun. This fact was apparently unknown to Biderman and other Ashley Madison executives more than a year later when their July 2015 hack was first revealed.

Does Harrison’s untimely suicide rule him out as a suspect in the 2015 hack? Who is The Chaos Creator, and what else transpired between Harrison and Ashley Madison prior to his death? We’ll explore these questions in Part II of this story, to be published early next week.

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USN-6212-1: Linux kernel (Intel IoTG) vulnerabilities

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Hangyu Hua discovered that the Flower classifier implementation in the
Linux kernel contained an out-of-bounds write vulnerability. An attacker
could use this to cause a denial of service (system crash) or possibly
execute arbitrary code. (CVE-2023-35788, LP: #2023577)

It was discovered that for some Intel processors the INVLPG instruction
implementation did not properly flush global TLB entries when PCIDs are
enabled. An attacker could use this to expose sensitive information
(kernel memory) or possibly cause undesired behaviors. (LP: #2023220)

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CVE-2021-32495

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Radare2 has a use-after-free vulnerability in pyc parser’s get_none_object function. Attacker can read freed memory afterwards. This will allow attackers to cause denial of service.

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CVE-2021-32494

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Radare2 has a division by zero vulnerability in Mach-O parser’s rebase_buffer function. This allow attackers to create malicious inputs that can cause denial of service.

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CVE-2021-33798

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A null pointer dereference was found in libpano13, version libpano13-2.9.20. The flow allows attackers to cause a denial of service and potential code execute via a crafted file.

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SEC Consult SA-20230705-0 :: Path traversal bypass & Denial of service in Kyocera TASKalfa 4053ci printer

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Posted by SEC Consult Vulnerability Lab, Research via Fulldisclosure on Jul 07

SEC Consult Vulnerability Lab Security Advisory < 20230705-0 >
=======================================================================
title: Path traversal bypass & Denial of service
product: Kyocera TASKalfa 4053ci printer
vulnerable version: TASKalfa 4053ci Version <= 2VG_S000.002.561
fixed version: 2VG_S000.002.574
CVE numbers: CVE-2023-34259, CVE-2023-34260, CVE-2023-34261…

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SEC Consult SA-20230703-0 :: Multiple Vulnerabilities including Unauthenticated RCE in Siemens A8000

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Posted by SEC Consult Vulnerability Lab, Research via Fulldisclosure on Jul 07

SEC Consult Vulnerability Lab Security Advisory < 20230703-0 >
=======================================================================
title: Multiple Vulnerabilities including Unauthenticated RCE
product: Siemens A8000 CP-8050 MASTER MODULE (6MF2805-0AA00)
Siemens A8000 CP-8031 MASTER MODULE (6MF2803-1AA00)
vulnerable version: <= V04.92
fixed version: CPCI85 V05
CVE…

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